Steve just had to take a stupid tourist picture of himself holding up the tower- I believe it's a requirement, and the Consorzio Turistico Area Pisana will hunt you down and throw you off that very tower you have disgraced...
...so I was forced into the tourist pics! Molested too, as you can see ;)
I'm supposed to be leaning against the tower to hold it up...
...instead, it backfired! I've already complained about being a perma-zombie, but now it's true! I am actually undead! Though I can't prove it, as it looks like I am far away and can easily run to safety!
As you can see, Pisa comes with it's own all-seeing DUOMO! It is very charming and laid back, though, and oval, and blue, which might just make it the Anti-Duomo...
There is a long gothic cemetery behind the first Duomo (not the Anti-Duomo, but it is a really fun bapistry) called the Camposanto; it's long, made of marble, and has many wonderfully elaborate tombs, like this really hot one which I'm going to get made for me...Ignore the hipster guy- we can't get rid of the hipsters, but maybe we can shun them to an island somewhere...
The cemetery also contains the wonderful fresco the Triumph of Death; all my pistures look like a faded wreck, but even you un-morbid types should look at it! Death is this crazy flying green women, middle-rightish, there are three coffins bottom left corner (skeleton, fresh bloated corpse, lovely regular corpse), there are soul tug-of-wars between demons and angels, there are torches...oh, I promised you some real corpses...right-o! I shall provide...
St. Bartholomew's Mummified Hand
Quick and morbid art history lesson! Christian relics-an object, especially a piece of the body or a personal item of someone of religious significance, carefully preserved with an air of veneration as a tangible memorial. This is a first-class relic because it's the body part of a martyr. Xians used to follow the pilgrimage trail back in the middle ages, visiting martyr body parts and buying souveniers, much like we today follow the Disneyland trail, or I made a Beatles pilgrimage a while back (so much crap I own!). Ye olde ancient fanny packs!
St. Bartholomew was one of the twelve apostles, and he was flayed alive and crucified upside down. I couldn't actually find why he was marty
red, though. This Body Worlds corpse was flayed too!It is totally OK for us to find this bronze door funny, as the art history professor does too! It was made by Bonnannus for the Cathedral, and it depicts the Massacre of the Innocents quite sillily indeed: there are two babies with their heads lopped off, a mother going NOOOOooooOOOo trying to protect the last one, that guy in the middle is doing his job quite casually, and King Herod is pointing at him. Well done!
We now head over to the quite flamboyant town of Lucca, Tuscany. This place has elicited much swooning among everyone in the world, which just overhyped the place for me. I didn't adore it, but it's pretty wonderful. The centre of town was a Roman ampitheatre, so the rest of the town follows, and it's really circle-y. Now a corpse:
St. Zita vs. Michael Jackson in a chamber. I've been long condemned to hell anyways. St. Zita has a lovely story where she stole bread from her rich boss to give to the poor, he asked her to empty her apron, and nothing but flowers came out! More importantly, she has not decomposed and is still wearing her skin, unlike poor St. Bartholomew. The locals make a St. Zita cake made out of vegetables, and it tastes like pumpkin pie loaded with cardamon and pine nuts. As Rachel Ray would say, deelish!
The Museo Della Cattedrale also has a relic, this time St. Sebastian's vertebrae! Unfortunately, they had a strict NO FOTOGRAFIA rule, and a crochety old Tuscan man (apparently, there are no shortage of those) enforcing it. So, click on "visita virtuale", click on "piano ammezzato", click on "Sala III", and scroll down. Voila! Also lovely are the John the Baptist heads, right on the "piano terra" page!
And to get all that corpsey taste out of your mouth, here are some terrible pictures of Lucca. The first one is the centre of town, all ampitheatrey. Love the random-sized buildings! The rest of the town looked like a Fellini film, and I didn't manage to capture that at all. Also, Puccini was from here.
